


Things, Sent to Test Us

by FlyingPigPoet



Series: There Oughta Be a Superhero Handbook [4]
Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Lena Luthor Needs a Hug, how these smart kids got here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-19
Updated: 2017-06-20
Packaged: 2018-11-16 00:08:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 5,634
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11242152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FlyingPigPoet/pseuds/FlyingPigPoet
Summary: The next few episodes of season one,in different  points of view....





	1. Chapter 1

Kara Danvers had never understood why humans sometimes fainted at the sight of blood. Men, she could almost understand, since they generally had no experience with seeing their own blood, smelling the iron tang. But women got used to it from a young age, ten, eleven, twelve. And once you had to, as Alex had once described it under her breath, "deal with that shit for four to eight days a month, and you knew that that would mean forty or so years, which if you do the math, means between 1900 and 3800 days of your life, give or take--"

Well, as Alex had pointed out, why on Earth would you faint?

And as Kara knelt on the carpet in Cat Grant's office, staring and the narrow red stream falling with gravity from her finger because she scoffed Cat's well-meant advice and just tried to pick up the broken glass with her bare hands...

And as Kara knelt staring, she tried to remember what she had been thinking, although she was pretty sure it had to do with Earth as your context.

Maybe something about being an alien.

That whole "You can't make me bleed" thing.

That.

But if Kara Danvers respected anyone the way she respected Alex, it would probably be Cat Grant, so Kara pulled herself together and said, "Gosh, Ms. Grant, you were right. I'd better make sure not to get any blood on my dress."

Cat made no comment, merely wrapped Kara's finger in a tissue and called on the next person down the ladder to come in and deal with the broken glass. Wobbling a bit, Kara had climbed the stairs to the roof, tried unbutton her shirt, only to realize that she was wearing a white dress with a zipper on the back. "Darn it!" she weighed the consequences of flying by day dressed in street clothes, but unwisely decided to risk it. Fortunately, her powers had another idea entirely.

Finally coming to her senses, Kara went down to the top floor and stood waiting by the elevator. She texted her sister.

AgentPotSticker: Hey, need a ride to your work. Have a dilmmemma.

AgentLabRat: Are you Ok? you sound drunk...

Agent PotSticker: No, f course not. Just got cut, is all, can't exctly get round like usually do. Finger notwkring.

AgentLabRat: Be right there.

By the time Kara reached the first floor and made it through the lobby, Alex's motorcycle was pulling up to the sidewalk. Kara looked at Alex and looked at herself in a dress. She thought about the idea of hanging on behind Alex and felt dizzy at the thought. She normally loved riding behind her sister, but today was... different.

Alex pulled off her helmet and took in the mess that was her sister with, functionally, a papercut in a nanosecond. She opened one of the side bags and pulled out a t-shirt and yoga pants. "Go change. We'll pack your clothes in here."

//

Kara leaned on Alex as they entered the DEO. Agents looked surprised to see Supergirl in street clothes and looking week. They asked questions, offered help. When the sisters got to the command center, Agent Vasquez handed Alex a barracks locker room key and as they were leaving the room, handed a folder to Hank Henshaw.

The locker had two Supergirl suits and an old set of Alex's black tactical gear. Kara asked Alex for help with the Supergirl suit, and Alex helped her put it on, making no comment. Kara knew that Alex knew that feeling strong had multiple dimensions. The woman who wore black 91% of the time surely knew that a superhero needed her supersuit to even begin to face the difficulties inherent in even temporarily being less than... super.

The tests were no fun. Even hearing her mother's computer-simulated voice telling her that the change was temporary, fixable, normal-ish (not Alura's term), didn't help, although she was slightly heartened when the AI said, "Your battle with the android has drained you of the energy you take from the yellow sun. You are now vulnerable to pain, injury, death. But have faith. Once your cells have absorbed sufficient radiation, your powers should return. Do not be afraid. And until you have fully recovered, lean on those you trust."

Alex tried to be supportive. "This happens to Superman too," she said. "I mean, he loses his power for a couple days, right?"

"Yeah," said Kara, "but it's been two days and I don't feel any different."

"You're just going stir-crazy because the DEO has been testing you all weekend. Now you can go out into the real world and see what it's like to be human for a day."

Hank Henshaw, coming up behind them, added, "You might learn what it's like for the rest of us."

Alex said, "Kara is going back to work. I'm just walking her out."

He nodded. "I'm off to deal with an unruly guest. Might need your help when you're free."

"Happy to, sir."

Henshaw strode off. Supergirl murmured, "Nice. I'd have no idea you suspect him of anything."

"I have to play it that way until I find out whether or not he was involved in Dad's death."

//

Kara had read studies that suggested that sadness, anxiety and depression could suppress the human immune system. On the bus back to CatCo, she wondered if her sadness about Hank's possible treachery were betraying her immune system too. A kid with sniffles standing next to her on the bus was one thing, but when she reached the top floor in the elevator and began sneezing, that was something different.

The moment Winn saw her, late and blowing her nose, he knew something was off.

She explained, "I blew out my powers fighting that android."

"What? For how long? I can help you figure it out. I still have the Kryptonian bioanalytics from Alex's DEO files."

But of course Cat stepped off her personal elevator just as he was saying that and just as Kara was sneezing again. Cat looked offended. "Keira? You never get sick. That's the best part about you."

Kara said, "That's best part?"

But Cat was too busy stringing together if/then clauses that sounded like the messenger who lost the kingdom due to the loss of a horseshoe nail. But at least it got Kara the rest of the day off. Silver lining?


	2. Conqueror of Twelve Worlds

A more objective observer, say, an alien who had completely blended in with the human world on Earth perhaps, might have seen Kara Zor-El's panic about her temporary experience of human life to be... amusing? Typical of powered individuals? Simply one more example of the existential anxiety that all creatures across all galaxies probably experienced eventually, none having proved that immortality could actually exist?

Such an observer, if taken on a tour of the DEO containment facilities, might have recognized similar symptoms among its other... guests. J'em, for example, a tall red alien with, hah, an actual shining gem in his forehead, who claimed (on multiple occasions to be "master of the faceless fountains, conqueror of twelve worlds" blah, blah, blah). He would be a perfect example of the Extraterrestrial Existential Angst Syndrome (EEAS) currently being experienced by Supergirl. Such an observer, in the presence of J'em, a creature who clearly would use as his? its? opening gambit an attempt to break through the psychic barriers of the imprisoners, to take control of their minds, force them to let the creature out. For that creature, the news that its cell had neural shielding would come as a blow.

A human, a DEO agent, for example, who watched the interaction between the psychic evil overlord (retired) and the human DEO director (unimpressed), might easily find herself frowning at that interaction. She might think that her director was not known for bravado or a lack of caution. She might wonder if he was actually trying to rile the alien for his own purposes. She might try to figure out how on Earth (literally) that would be strategically useful. She might fail to figure it out. She might find the following exchange surprising, confusing, worrisome?

J'em: "I will grind your loved ones to dust."

Henshaw: "There are none left to grind."


	3. The World Can Do Without-- Oh, Wait.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Sealing the base could simply not take a lifetime. The fact that Henshaw had to tell her twice to seal the base would come back to haunt Alex later. But he did not have to tell her three times, and that is probably why (she later reflected) she kept her job. As the three-foot doors slid closed on any alien leaving (or any human), she thought, with relief, I did my duty.
> 
> Then she thought, We are now locked underground with a small battalion of very angry aliens. Oh, shit.
> 
> And then she thought, I'm going to need a lot of ammo."

Kara walked back from CatCo toward home. In theory, she knew the bus routes. In theory, she knew what a cab would cost, but in the end, she knew how to get from work to her apartment and she knew that walking would cost her nothing. And on a normal day, something admittedly rare in her experience of the last six weeks, it would have cost nothing. Nothing for her, and nothing for anybody else. But today was not a normal day.

It started, well, normal-ish.

She had picked up a Pumpkin Spice from Noonan's and headed back, only to be caught up by James, who, the moment he heard her sneeze, laughed and told her she had been caught up in a Solar Flare. He told her to enjoy her day off and, at the mere prospect of that happening, the universe had thrown National City an earthquake.

Because of course it would.

Seriously? We're talking two seconds here. Two freaking seconds between saying the world can manage and everybody falling down on the sidewalk, a terrifying tear in the fabric of space, time and most importantly the freaking sidewalk. Bridges crumble. Cars swerved. People tumbled to the ground and then skittered away from that tear in the road, sidewalk, reality...

Normal people ran. Kara, pushing herself up to standing, tried to get her laser vision to stop an oncoming SUV, but only James pushing her away from its trajectory kept her from the fate of the fire hydrant it smashed into, causing its life to pump away second by second--

//

The DEO, on the other hand, as Kara found out about later, did not experience the earthquake the way the rest of National City did. Later, over scotch, Alex had talked about the perils of closed systems in comparison to open systems, and had made interesting metaphors about the Earth as a closed system with its environmental crisis at hand, and then the (okay, maybe just a little bit open system since the alien thing was only one-way) addition of aliens as an uncontrollable variable...

The point, as far as Kara could make out, was that even simple systems with easily explainable problems were complicated and complicated systems with any problems were essentially just fucked. That was absolutely not the way Kara would have explained it, and probably not what Alex would have said sober.

Possibly.

So later on, when Kara heard about how the earthquake had struck the DEO's desert base a bit later than it had hit National City, closer to the coast, Kara had been a little shocked at the blasé way Alex had talked about being locked down in an underground secret base, off all maps, stuck in the dark with scared armed agents and vengeance-focused powered alien prisoners. Stuck. Locked in.

Maybe, Kara thought, for life...

//

Agent Alex Danvers, naturally, didn't see it the same way. Years of training and practice out in the field made most of the necessary "automatic" reactions natural, like muscle memory that works before the brain can figure out what the body just did.

The Earth quaked. Lights went out. Alex switched to auxiliary power, tried immediately to get eyes on the prisoner who was the most worrisome, in this case J'em, Conqueror of, yeah, you remember. But the system reboot could take up to seven seconds. And seven seconds could be a lifetime.

Sealing the base could simply not take a lifetime. The fact that Henshaw had to tell her twice to seal the base would come back to haunt Alex later. But he did not have to tell her three times, and that is probably why (she later reflected) she kept her job. As the three-foot doors slid closed on any alien leaving (or any human), she thought, with relief, I did my duty.

Then she thought, We are now locked underground with a small battalion of very angry aliens. Oh, shit.

And then she thought, I'm going to need a lot of ammo.

//

When the car hit the fire hydrant, James and Kara went flying and they both hit the pavement hard.

Kara, as Supergirl, had fallen from the sky, fallen from the edge of space, made craters in floors, craters in the Earth itself. This time, she made no mark, but her arm hurt beyond any pain he had experienced yet. It was hard to focus. James kept her talking, made a sling from his shirt so she didn't have to carry the whole weight of her bad arm herself, and then they had headed toward CatCo, but travel on the ground took extra time.

But they arrived and no one kept them from taking the elevator to the top floor. Kara immediately called Alex, who said that she was on lockdown, "standard procedure while we run security protocols." 

And that sounded safe and wise but Kara was pretty sure it was anesthetizing language for "I'm locked in with a bunch of superpowered psychopaths" but she just told her big sister she loved her and got on with her job. That was what Alex was doing. That was what Kara would do.

She watched Cat give a speech about how people who needed to go home should, and then take photos of those who chose to with her phone. Sometimes she loved Cat. Times like this she sort of hated her. But Cat had a point. In times of crisis, journalists had a higher calling than family. They had at the very least a city to protect.

As Cat herself said, "People are scared. They're looking for information and it is our duty to help them."

The problem was, she was saying it to the wrong guy. Winn, on the other hand, never had a box to think out of. He smiled and started digging into CatCo's systems. Kara watched, aching and grateful that her human friends were not as limited as she was by humanity.


	4. Making Choices in Real Time

The DEO agents listened to the little Alura Zor-El had to tell them about J'em and then shut her off and finished their mission prep in her AI chamber. Kara had insisted that Alex also be able to access Alura's knowledge in case Kara herself were ever incapacitated, and just recently with her solar flare, that had turned out to be prescient. Now, it was beyond practical. Alex pointed out that they only had three mobile neural inhibitors. She was more than shocked when Henshaw gave the other two besides his to Sung and Reynolds, two men.

She said, "Sir, I have more field experience than Reynolds and Sung combined!"

"That's why I need you to remain behind. I have to know I can leave these people with someone I can trust. Unless you're implying that you and I have a problem."

"No, sir."

//

Back at CatCo, Winn got the feeds all back online by magic. Cat did not fail to notice. The fact that she had failed to notice Winn (not from the satellite company) from the desk opposite Kara's that Cat passed on her way to her office every day, was a smallish thing. The fact that Maxwell Lord was spreading doubt and discord in the aftermath of a national disaster, came as no surprise to anyone.

Cat growled, "Look at Max, using the earthquake as a branding opportunity."

"Yeah," said James. "He's sticking it to Supergirl pretty hard."

"Well, I'm not going to let that bloviating narcissist knock my creation down just to build himself up. Witt! You have proven yourself not to be incompetent. Let's start a feed in my office. We are going to counter Max's message about my girl."

Winn muttered, "If I'm not back in half an hour, send, send help."

"Max is spreading panic," complained Kara. "People are already scared."

"What do you want to do?" asked James.

"Go down and stop him!"

"Can't just fly down to him like you'd usually do. This guy is surrounded by security."

"Yeah, but he's also a showman who loves preening for the press, and luckily for Supergirl, she's friends with Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist, Jimmy Olsen."

//

Usually, teams were split up into groups: Alpha, Beta, Gama. This time there was one team, three members, and everything riding on them. With Henshaw in the lead, Sung and Reynolds behind, they were relying on Central Command--tonight that meant Danvers--to keep them up to speed with whatever the surveillance cameras could detect.

Sung asked, "Danvers, you see anything?"

Alex answered, "Nothing. Cameras are clear, heat sensors, negative."

She followed their progress, her hand itching to reach toward her holster, but she said, "We're getting some kind of interference on our end. Earthquake may have damaged the circuitry."

And admittedly, the weird strobing of the red emergency lights couldn't have made their job easier. One of them turned and shot a bust behind them and the cameras recorded partial darkness.

The audio came in as: "We've lost lights. Headlamps on. Henshaw, are you here?"

Alex said, "We only see two of you."

"Where's Director Henshaw?"

"He's gone. I don't see him."

Alex watched the viewscreens go blank then unclear with red and blue lights but with no clear agents. "Be advised, we lost visual."

"Hostiles in our--"

"What's he doing out there?"

"It's like he's all around us!"

Gunfire sounded in their earpieces. Heartrate lines flatlined on their viewscreens. Alex muttered to herself, "Two agents down. What happened to Director Henshaw?"

//

Pillars of smoke rose from National City's most famous landmarks, its biggest businesses' biggest headquarters, the locations where the majority of the city's population worked. Pillars of smoke, in this case, did not indicate God leading the enslaved Israelites out of slavery, thought Jimmy Olsen. But he couldn't help resonating with the biblical imagery. And he caught it on camera whenever he could.

And when Kara had urged him to take the "photo-op" pictures of Maxwell "I Am the Lord (er, Pharaoh)" he had gritted his teeth and done it, knowing what was at stake. The rich white man who more often than not caused the major hurt in National City was now giving out blankets, water and blood plasma. Jimmy smiled and smiled.

A black man had to smile in this situation. His mother had taught him that early and often.

So when Maxwell Lord posed for the photos and said, "Jimmy Olsen! Thanks for shooting our relief efforts!"

James had responded automatically, "Of course."

"Heard you hung up your camera," said Lord, smiling as if that could be a good thing.

"Oh, well, I still break it out when the need arises."

Lord's attention shifted to Kara, who called herself Cat Grant's assistant, which immediately made him ignore her and look for opportunities for marketing shots, but Kara, being who she was, persisted.

"Don't you think that people need a more positive message? Hope instead of fear? I just think if Supergirl could be here..."

"But she's not. Supergirl lulls us into a sense of complacency. We think she'll save us and that renders us incapable thinking of saving ourselves. If anything, Supergirl should be thanking me for what I'm not saying."

"Which is what?" asked Kara.

"That she lost her powers," said Lord. "I'm guessing she blew out her photovoltaic capabilities fighting that military android. She's just a dead battery now. I studied Superman. It takes him 48 hours to recharge. We're way past that. If she hasn't gotten her powers back yet, there's a good chance she never will. And that means: we're on our own."

And that was when they were all tested. A woman was crying for help, for her father. They went and attempted to help. Max diagnosed the man as having tension pneumothorax, but without knowing exactly which blood vessel was leaking, they could not make a difference, and certainly not in the minute time remaining for them. They needed at the very least and X-ray that would tell them which vessel was disrupted. Better than that would be the gift of flight, to carry the man to National City General Hospital, a little more than a half mile away.

A simple half mile. A simple X-ray. Such simple things...

For a Kryptonian on Earth...

With her normal yellow-sun-derived powers.

Impossible for an alien whose alien powers had been stolen by another mission. Kara took off her glasses and squinted hard but it was no use. All she could do was watch the man die.

//

Henshaw came back from his mission alone. He claimed that J'em had killed the other two and destroyed their neural inhibitors. He claimed that he found burn marks on Reynolds's skull, from a psychic scan that gave J'em full knowledge of the DEO's security. It would be an obvious plan for J'em to break out the other prisoners to get them all out of the base. Henshaw insisted on going back out alone and taking care of J'em. He loaded up on extra ammunition and left.

Alex spent the time uneasily. Finally, she went to Donovan, quietly told him in broad strokes about her fears regarding Henshaw. "This isn't the first time he's been the only survivor of a botched mission, and the details of that one were as hazy as this."

"So what do we do?"

"We go out there, only we don't have any neural inhibitors to protect us from J'em."

"I'm in."

They armed themselves and crept through the dark halls, lit only with the red emergency lights. It didn't take them long to reach the last place they had seen the team on the cameras, and the two bodies crumpled on the floor were still. Alex knelt down to feel for a pulse, but the skin of both men was already growing cool. What she did find was both neural inhibitors, still glowing blue, not broken. She immediately put one on and handed the other to Donovan.

"But," he said, "Hank said-- Oh, man, this isn't good, is it?"

"No, it isn't. Put that inhibitor on."

The flash of red light lit up Donovan's black shirt, and Alex thought, Too slow, too slow--

Suddenly he dropped the inhibitor and pulled his sidearm. "He's... in my head. I'm not sure... how long I can... hold him off. Go. Go!"

Alex turned and ran.


	5. More Than We Knew We Could

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Kara and James stumbled away from the dead man and his daughter, still crying in Maxwell Lord's arms. Kara's arm still throbbed incessantly, like a pulse: on-ly hu-man, on-ly hu-man. She sat down at a bus stop and looked at the blood on her hands. She stared at James, "I couldn't save him.""

Kara and James stumbled away from the dead man and his daughter, still crying in Maxwell Lord's arms. Kara's arm still throbbed incessantly, like a pulse: on-ly hu-man, on-ly hu-man. She sat down at a bus stop and looked at the blood on her hands. She stared at James, "I couldn't save him."

"You did all you could."

"As Kara Danvers. As Supergirl, I could have done more. These past few weeks have been the best of my life. I was finally starting to make a difference, helping people the way I've always wanted. Do you know what that's like to have that ripped away?"

"Can't say that I do. But I do know that you're the same girl you were before. Losing your powers has not changed that."

"It's changed everything! I feel so helpless!"

"What you're feeling is human."

"And what if Max Lord is right and I never get them back? What kind of hero could I be without them? I couldn't even save one man."

"No hero can save everyone, not even Superman. But a real hero never stops trying."

Across the street, a man with a crowbar smashed the glass door of a liquor store, and then three more men pushed through the door with him. Kara stood up. James jumped up to follow.

"Hey! What are you doing?" he asked.

"Like you said, I can't stop trying."

"When you get your powers. But that's a mob scene. They could have guns! You could get shot! The bullets are not going to bounce off of you this time."

"They don't know that!"

//

Alex had never been particularly scared of the dark as a child. If anything, night was the time (BK) when she told herself stories of adventure and later (AK) she and Kara told each other stories, whispering in the dark until their parents heard their giggles and yelled upstairs for them to go to sleep.

Somehow, Alex had feared that her thirst for adventures would go away once she actually experienced some, that the dangers and challenges would cease to hold any appeal, that she would slink back to a quiet life in the lab, proving everything Eliza thought about her right and everything that Vasquez told her about herself wrong.

That had not happened.

Now here she was stalking the corridors of the DEO's underbelly, in the dark, armed to the teeth, behind her two dead men and a man whose brain had just been invaded; ahead of her a man she had once trusted with more than her life; and somewhere in the dark a powerful alien who would rip her head off as soon as look at her--and that would be the gentle option.

And Alex felt good, like she'd just spent the morning surfing. In her head she was tracing her way through a map of the DEO, clearing corridors, methodically eliminating where J'em wasn't so as to find where he was. She came to a corner, peered around it, stepped forward and a hand covered her mouth and dragged her into a side room. Hank.

"What are you doing here?" he rasped. 

"Donovan and I, we were looking for you?"

"Where is he now?"

She looked down.

"You lost him. Damn it! That's why I told you to stay with the others!"

"You also said that the inhibitors had been destroyed! You lied!"

"Because I didn't want you doing something STUPID like this!"

In her ear, a voice said, "Agent Danvers, come in."

"Copy, Donovan. What's your status?"

"I'm okay, but I'm out here on my own."

"Thought I'd lost you."

"You're not getting rid of me that easy."

"Okay, rendezvous--"

But Hank said, "Don't. It's not Donovan anymore. J'em, I know it's you."

"You've only delayed the inevitable," said J'em. "I will free the other prisoners and break through to the surface. There's no escape for you."

Hank turned to her. "We have to reach a secure location."

Alex raised her rifle. "Back away from the door and drop your weapon."

"Alex--"

"Now!"

Hank dropped his sidearm to the floor. Alex kicked it away.

"Alex, what are you doing? I'm not the enemy."

"Is that why you didn't tell me about my father? That he was DEO, and that you blackmailed him to serve under you?"

"Your father believed in me. He was a great man."

"You don't get to talk about him!" Alex handed him a steel restraint. "You chain yourself. To those bars on the door. Now."

She touched her earpiece. "J'em, this is Agent Danvers. I know you want those blast doors open. You don't need to release the prisoners to do that. You just need me. I have the access code. I will be waiting for you in the control room. Because one way or another, this ends now."

And the thing about surfing is that, once you find a long sweet wave and get to your feet, you ride it to the very end.

//

It had taken more time and pain than she had expected to change into her supersuit with a broken arm, but it was the only way. She strode across the street, with James tailing behind her, camera at the ready.

There were three men, one holding a gun on the man and woman who ran the store, one emptying the cash register and one throwing large bottles of cheap liquor in a bag.. The tension in the air, and the sweat, were palpable. One of the gunman was looking nervous and the storeowner scared.

"Shut up! Shut up!"

Kara opened the door with her good hand. "You don't want to do that."

"Stay back. Don't come any closer!" He pointed his gun at her.

Slowly, Kara inched forward, saying calmly, "You don't want to hurt these people." She willed herself to believe it. She kept her bad hand behind her, hoping they would not see how much it was shaking.

"I know you're scared. We all are," said Supergirl honestly. "You want to save yourself, your family. But don't you see that we're all in this together? There's about a dozen ways that I can stop you right now. But I don't think I have to. Because this is not you. It isn't any of you."

The closer she got to the man, the more of the fear she could see in his brown eyes, eyes like Alex's and James's, the more he looked like her friends. "I believe that we are better than this. We choose who we want to be. And I know that you're going to choose to be a better man."

Slowly, she reached out her hand and the man gave her his gun. She smiled at him, not even hearing the click of James's camera.

//

As Agent Alex Danvers waited in the control room, she remembered a conversation she had had with Agent Vasquez not long after she finished her training and was starting to run missions with the team. One of other agents, maybe Donovan?, had held the door for her one day, and she had laughed at him, saying, "Don't be such a Boy Scout!"

Vasquez had turned and said, first to him, "Agents get their own doors," and then to her, "Don't knock Boy Scouts. The Boy Scout motto is Be Prepared. Here at the DEO we have to always be prepared, not for what you expect, the normal stuff, or not only for that. We have to prepare for the extranormal, the unexpected, the things you can't by definition be prepared for."

"Yeah, that's what I told my mother when I was packing for the camping trip my class took to Yosemite. She called it overkill."

Vasquez had grinned. "Sometimes overkill is just exactly enough kill."

Perched on the walkway high above the command center, Alex smiled. She had finally acclimated to the low visibility and the strobing red lights. She had set herself up directly across from the main entrance, where the alien's glowing forehead gem would act nicely to give her something at which to aim her welcoming shots. 

He made her job even easier by saying, "Show yourself!" He strode slowly forward, sneering, "Let us see if you die with more honor than your fallen friends!"

She shot four dozen rounds into his massive chest, causing him to fall backwards. Perfect. She held on to the walkway's guardrail, turned away and hit the detonator. The bomb under the command center table exploded. That didn't stop him from shooting a laser at her from his forehead gem, but she was ready for it, already running across the catwalk and racing down the stairs.

He moved to meet her, probably not prepared for the shotgun blasts: one, two, three. The third shot out his gem. He fell, but did not scream or rage. He said, "It will take more than that to kill me, human."

She pulled out two Glocks and shot with both hands, emptying the mags with shots that tore his shirt to tatters but seemed to only dent his chest. She yelled and he knocked both her guns away, backhanded her to the floor. She dragged herself backwards and part of the catwalk fell on J'em's head, distracting him.

And maybe Alex was a little concussed, but in the red light, the person who was attacking J'em didn't look human. Had one of the other prisoners escaped? Then there was the noise of a neck breaking and a body falling and then the lights came back up and Hank stood there, sweating but only slightly out of breath. He said, "I told you, Alex. I'm not the enemy."


	6. The Stories We Can Tell

The news told stories about the earthquakes and aftershocks, Supergirl's absence, the city's resilience while she was gone, the rescues she had made since she got back: the school bus, the building fire.

Alex felt guilty about not being able to tell Kara what Hank Henshaw had told her about Jeremiah's death, about the Hank Henshaw her father had worked for and the J'onn J'onzz she now worked for, and the promise he had made to Jeremiah. Instead, she simply left a message telling her that she was okay and they would talk soon.

And they would.

Later, Kara would tell Alex about how James and Winn had helped get the upstairs CatCo employees down after the second aftershock, how James had dangled from a breaking thread and fallen, how her Kryptonian adrenaline kicked in to return her powers, save him, save more of National City.

And Kara would talk about the man she couldn't save. And Alex would talk about the three men who had died, Donovan who she had known for years, Sung and Reynolds who she had barely known at all.

Kara didn't tell her about the unfortunate hug between her and James, and Winn's response. She didn't tell her about the awkwardness that now hung between the three of them. She didn't tell her about visiting Cat Grant. She didn't tell her those things, not because it was private, but because, when she got knocked out of the sky by Astra and two of her Kryptonite soldiers, it kind of slipped her mind.


End file.
